Four Stone Hearth XXXII

Welcome to Testimony of the spade and to the Four Stone Hearth edition 32.

The remains of an Iron Age dolmen, originally there has been a lid/roof stone and probably another erected stone.

I thought I’d open up this the 32 edition of the 4SH blog carnival with a few pictures taken last summer at a small Iron Age grave field in Halland county, Sodra Unnaryd parish. The grave field is called Bedjaror or RAA 58:1. In previous posts I’ve written about a grave type called Iron Age dolmen. This is a typical grave field that contains this type of dolmens; besides dolmens there are normally a few cairns flanked by erected stones and stone circles. This grave field is dated to the early Iron Age (500 BC-500 AD). More info about this grave type can be found in previous posts here, here and here.

Bedjaror as seen from southeast

Now lets get this show on the road:

Some of the posts have been recommended, others submitted and yet others found as I scavengered the net for interesting blogs.

Archaeology more often than not concerns remote periods, this time we move in to A Very Remote Time Indeed, where we can read the post: Kids did the darndest things. What evidence are there of children from Paleolithic time, except skeletal? The reader of this post gets awarded with a free pdf-article and should also check out Afarensis post on Neanderthal children. We’ll hang on to the very remote periods for a little while longer as we move on to John Hawks that posts an interview with Michelle Drapeau. The interview is about her work on the anatomy of early hominids and her recent field work in Ethiopia. Remote Central brings us even further back in time as guest blogger Terry Toohill writes a post on the Mitochondrial Eve, from where or whom do we originate?

We move on in time but stays on trail in the scrap yard of DNA, where there is more to find than mitochondria such as genes. From Aardvarchaeology comes a post on genes and humans. It is an interesting post that deals with the differences between humanistic traditions and natural sciences, but also how natural science is used within humanistic reserarch such as archaeology. Martin takes his starting point in the post From where came the Slavs published at the blog Gene Expression. The Aardvarchaeology post was published on the 14th and has already accumulated more than 60 comments, so it seems to be a hot topic. I would say that the comments are just as interesting as the post if not more so.

At SEArch – the Sotuheast Asian newsblog – the plain of jars in Laos is presented. This Iron Age relics are made out of solid stone boulders and can weigh up to 13 metric tons and range from 1m-3m in height. They are thought to be 1,500-2,000 years old. Read all about it here!

Archaeoporn gives us an insight modern day relic trade, the creation of cultural heritage and forgery ancient relics.

Moving on to osteology. From the blog Archaezoology comes a post concerning the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in England, in the 5th century AD and the effect this had on animal husbandry. An interesting post that uses P. J. Crabtrees article Sheep, Horses, Swine and Kine: A Zooarchaeological Perspective on the Anglo-Saxon Settlement of England (Journal of Field Archaeology 16) from 1989 as a starting point.

From some bones to others. In this case teeth; human teeth. I just love that there is a blog about ancient teeth: Hominin Dental Anthrolopgy. This post is a review of Jeffrey H. Schwartz book What the Bones Tell Us.

We started out in remote periods of time and we end it all with a few more contemporary posts: As the relationship between archaeology and modernity is a growing concern for archaeologists the blog Archaeolog invites you to study the dark side of modernity. Even more contemporary is perhaps the question; What Google and Facebook has to do with paleanthropology asked and answerd at Anthroplogy.net.

It feels like most of the post in this edition has concerned archaeology or been closely linked to archaeology (probably ’cause I’m an archaeologist) so this might seem a little out of place but I love cartoons so it’ll fit in here somehow. In India there seems to be a trend to create new domestic super heroes based on Indian mythology and folklore. I also wanna be cool and read Hanuman, (based on the monkey-headed Hindu god). Read more on Our Cultural world.

Two other blogs I would like to include are Archaeoastronomy/Clioaudio that collects posting from different bloggs and prestent them in an easy access way and Archaeoblog that has been seving up old news since A.D. 2004. Great work!

Lastly I would like to thank all contributors for your effort, some knowingly others more or less shanghaied as their content found someone else’s eye or mine.

[…] constantly provides material that I wish I had used the last time I taught that particular topic. Four Stone Hearth #32 at Testimony of the Spade features several posts on neolithic children. This material probably would resonate well with […]

[…] in the four fields of anthropology. The previous edition of 4SH can be found at Testimony of the Spade, and the next edition will be hosted by Our Cultural World. The main page for Four Stone Hearth has […]

Welcome

Hello and welcome to Testimony of the spade.

My name is Magnus Reuterdahl and I am a Swedish archaeologist and osteologist. Most posts are connected to my work or my interests in general; Scandinavian archaeology, osteology, cultural heritage, literature and so forth.

On the blog Aqua Vitae (in Swedish) and Testimony of a wine (in English) junkie I blog on wine.